


the shape of things present

by papyrocrat



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-17 15:51:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papyrocrat/pseuds/papyrocrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>  series spoilers</p>
    </blockquote>





	the shape of things present

**Author's Note:**

>   series spoilers

title:  the shape of things present  
show:  BSG  
characters: Laura, Lee  
note:  series spoilers  
disclaimer:  not mine  
word count:  c. 850

 

His father can’t talk as they open the tent, exhaustion and grief pulling at his mouth like the moon on the tides.Lee doesn’t try.He tells himself it’s because they’re all at peace.

He watches her look over the horizon, still but for her halting breaths and curious eyes, as his father’s plane rips through the clouds.He lurks just beyond the shade, marveling at how she can make a blanket on some sticks create a threshold, unwilling to breach it and unable to leave.His father has a way of timing his departures to miss pyramid games and anniversaries.

He never has to leave anyone to die alone again.He holds his back against the bold yellow sun and silently begs her not to send him away.

“He’ll be back soon, Lee,” _she_ reassures _him_ , and for just a moment he lets comfort swallow absurdity and nods.“Would you care to have a seat?” she asks with her measured warmth, as if they’re back on Colonial One and he’s hovering over her desk trying not to pull at his cuffs.

 _Yes, thank you, Madam President_ , he thinks sharply, but the inaccuracy makes the words stick in his throat as he sits; neither of them are the president of anything anymore.She likes to get the little things right.

“I promise not to die on you, Captain Apollo.”The ghost of a wry smile haunts them for a moment.He forces himself to ignore the long spaces between her words, to have heard her speak in her cautious strong sentences.

Lee doesn’t know how to say goodbye, not really; he’s never had to find something worthwhile to say to someone once they’ve judged him worthy to share their last rations.He’d always thought this was how things were supposed to be, how they happened in a world without a holocaust, how they would happen after they’d drawn the cycle apart and quartered it across the globe, and so it would be easier.

He shakes his head. _This_ never gets easier.It’s good, he tells himself, it means they care.Lee leans back, the front of his shoulder gently bumping the back of hers, enough that she knows which way to fall.But she settles on him with purpose, keeping her eyes on the gazelles in the distance.

He inhales.Opens his mouth.Closes it again.

“What is it, Lee?” she asks neutrally.

 _Good question_ , he thinks, and stalls with protocol.“Ma’am.”

“Call me Laura.Please,” she says, and it’s not the interminable, overly solicitous _call-me-Andy_ he’d had to endure during his first month on the Quorum, when everyone around him but her was unabashedly desperate to make a good impression.She’s actually asking, making an entreaty he can answer, and braced for the possibility that he could possibly deny her any small kindness just now.

“Sure thing. Laura.” She’s right, it isn’t nothing; it breaks some kind of spell.He curls his ankles under his legs, and shifts until he can wrap an arm around her and trace soft, flat circles over a sharp shoulderblade, the way he and Zak had done for each other when they tried not to hear their parents fight.

 _The lady asked you a question_ , he rebukes himself in a deep, rough voice, _answer her,_ and wills his mind to cast out something.“How’d you do it?”She’d always asked _why_ , deeply engaged with motive and meaning, but her reason is solid beneath their hips, and besides, Lee’s never been sure there’s a reason for anything.There’s a puzzle to the _how_ , though, a process that orders a tiny corner of the universe and gives him a firm place to lean.

“I did a lot of things.Would you care to be more specific?”

“Any of it.All of it.”

“I don’t know.”She pauses.“It was all I did.It was me, for a while.There wasn’t any _how_ about it.Just what, and when it could happen.”

He nods.“I know I didn’t always –“ he cuts himself off, _she’s dying, Lee_ ; starts over, “I couldn’t have done that.Made myself into the office.I did the job as best I could, but I couldn’t change that way.”

“Of course not, Lee.” He catches his face as it starts to fall.“It’s who you were all along.”

His hand stops moving.“Thank you, Laura.”For a moment the only murmurs are the wind.“ _Did_ I ever say thank you?”Had _anyone_ ever thanked her?

She’s too gracious to answer directly.“You did save all of our asses a few times.I think we can call it even.”

“I suppose that’s fair.”

“Fair.”She turns the word over in her mouth like the refrain of a long-forgotten lullaby. _I know just how you feel,_ he thinks.“There’s really no such thing, is there?”

“Probably not,” he answers, too quickly.“But you’ve got to believe in something.”He feels rather than sees her nod, and the tightness in his throat falls away as he starts to understand that he doesn’t need to know what to say.

Lee can believe in this.

 


End file.
